Month: October 2015

The most successful lobbying doesn’t tell elected officials what to think. The most successful lobbying tells elected officials what to think about and how to think about it. Successful lobbying isn’t about bags of cash exchanged in underground parking garages or drunken promises extracted in rooms full of hookers. The best lobbying is about agenda…

Donald Trump continues to do well in the polls because people agree with what he says. This sounds obvious, but a lot of the experts in the political and pundit classes keep wondering the same thing: “How can Trump be popular when he’s so obviously nuts?” Some blame reality television, hyper-partisanship, partisan media, and a…

The best lobbyists are trusted experts and allies in the elected official’s policy efforts. The best lobbyists, in political science terms, offer legislative subsidies to elected officials. They provide the support on which Congressional staff, Members of Congress, and ultimately the American people, rely. This is in part because legislation about complex issues requires specialized…

Since the mid-1990s I have dropped in and out of the federal budget debate, the politics of the federal budget, and citizen engagement in the federal budget. The substance of that debate is largely the same today as it was when President Clinton was in office (one notable difference being that the government was running…